When you get a new laptop what are the first things you do? Normally I just remove bloatware and then get it online to do all the updating and off we go...untill there are problems. Then I am nuking the drive and doing the painful process of installing and updating everything.

This time I want to start off on the right foot. When I ordered my laptop I made sure to get restore disks with it. Once I got the laptop I have removed all bloatware but I haven't put it online just yet. I was thinking now would be a good time to image the drive in this pristine condition before doing so. Once I do that I figured I would do all the updates and image again. Then keep imaging after every batch of windows updates and major software installs.

Anyone think this is a good idea or have a better idea or have something I maybe forgetting? Please advise. Any help is much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

I would probably update all the drivers first, then image it... that gives you the updated 'working' version for your recovery baseline. Beyond that, I would probably just do a weekly image backup using software like Acronis... it keeps the backup file size down.

@Matt1970 So that would be too much imaging? I just figured that would keep me most up to date.

@Charlie98 Yeah that was one of my next questions...what the image sizes were. I was figuring that since mine is a 512 GB drive I would need that size to store the image. So I was thinking of two plans. The first was to go and partition the new drive to around 50GBs or so and then I can store the images on the the other partition. I can also back up to the cloud. My other plan was just to go buy a 2 TB external drive to store them and back it up to the cloud.

@Charlie98 Yeah that was one of my next questions...what the image sizes were. I was figuring that since mine is a 512 GB drive I would need that size to store the image. So I was thinking of two plans. The first was to go and partition the new drive to around 50GBs or so and then I can store the images on the the other partition. I can also back up to the cloud. My other plan was just to go buy a 2 TB external drive to store them and back it up to the cloud.

Acronis won't let you image to the same drive... (unless there is a workaround that I don't know about.) Besides, you would not want to store your backup on the same primary hard drive... if it crashes it'll take it all.

My system backup image is 101GBs, I have 3 separate 500GB HDDs that I backup to... one internal, 2 external that I rotate.